“On the matchmaking app, if we ask you a question and your tonality changes in the response, it cues to us that you may not be telling us the full truth. And so we’ll ask you that same question in two or three different ways throughout your experience,” Cohen-Aslatei says. “We built this to mimic what a matchmaker would do for a client. The LLM is tracking pitch and tone change in your voice because we want to make sure that we have an accurate understanding of who you are and what you’re looking for.”

After answering dozens more questions about lifestyle, future goals, boundaries, family, attraction, hobbies, and more over the course of a few days, Tai told me it’d take the information provided and get back to me. Two days later, I received my first two potential matches.

I Love You, Alive Girl

As a 31-year-old woman, I put my ideal age range at a healthy 26 to 40 years old. My first two matches were 23 and 47. One was not alive when 9/11 happened, and the other had already graduated from college at that time. Off to a rocky start.

When a potential match is found, the person’s picture is blurred, and Tai gives you a synopsis of what makes you a potential good match. (You need to provide selfie verification to confirm identity, and no one unverified will ever be matched.) After that, you can click to see a bit more about them, like profession, age, income, and a short bio that the AI creates.

At this stage of AI adoption, there is still a strong statistical bias toward, let’s say, men who wear wraparound sunglasses and think driving a Cybertruck is a sign of virility. Nearly every one of the 16 matches I received during testing was Christian and wanting children ASAP, which Tai flagged each time as a potential issue. Many were also flagged initially by Tai because they only wanted to date a certain race or valued traditional gender roles, both of which I made clear that I wasn’t aligned with.

Out of journalistic duty, I accepted every match I received; even a MMA-loving body builder that enjoys grilling meat (I’m vegan) and going to the gun range (I’m generally anti-gun). Matches ranged from Portland, Oregon, to DC, to New York City (where I live, although most matches were outside NYC). Overall, not a single person I was matched with would be someone I’d swipe right on if I saw them on a traditional dating app.

If you accept, you’ll either need to wait for the other person to accept or pass on the match, or they will have already accepted, and you can begin chatting. Here, your AI dating coach steps in to play wingman, providing prompts based on the other person’s profile, highlighting similarities you have, and giving conversation questions based on answers from the match’s profile. Not only does the coach provide potential ice breakers (and responses), you can also chat and ask for pointers.

I asked it to give me tips on how to break the ice with new matches, and it gave me advice, with each point having an explanatory paragraph below. Advice included giving compliments, asking open-ended questions, using humor, referencing current events, sharing about yourself, and mentioning mutual interests. The advice was basic but solid, and mirrored what the coach was doing with the provided conversation prompts.

This is all a great idea in theory, and could be very helpful with people who have a tough time communicating with strangers. But it could also lead to a bigger problem. You don’t really know who you’ve been talking to if AI has been doing all of the chatting for you. And if you meet in person, you don’t know much about your date’s actual personality. You can tell so much from how people type, what questions they ask, and their sense of humor. That was all missing here.

Rohr, as one of 10 children with 29 nieces and nephews, has watched countless family members and friends navigate hard pregnancies. In response, she’s determined to have a positive, empowering one. “I always thought having a baby was, like, the least casual thing ever,” she says. “It just seems like this life-changing thing that I wanted to be super, super sure about.”

Doctors say that, in general, all this new attention surrounding the “zero trimester” is a very positive, exciting development. Healthy moms usually spell better outcomes for mom and baby. Currently, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommend doctors ask patients of reproductive age if they plan to get pregnant within the year during checkups. “There’s so many things that we can do to optimize underlying health in that preconception year that will make outcomes in pregnancy better,” says Natalie Clark Stentz, an ob-gyn and reproductive endocrinologist and infertility specialist at Michigan Medicine. This is especially true if you have a chronic health condition, like diabetes, hypertension, depression, or a thyroid disease, that needs to be managed and monitored during pregnancy.

At the same time, that “prep” should be expert-vetted and backed by science, and it usually doesn’t involve the TikTok Shop. A doctor’s preconception toolbox is much simpler than what you might see online, and really hasn’t changed much in decades: ensure vaccinations are up to date, avoid alcohol, stop smoking and taking drugs, start a prenatal vitamin with folic acid to prevent neural tube defects at least a month before getting pregnant, and go through any prescription medications and supplements with your doctor. Only 5 percent of the preconception nutritional claims on social media reviewed in a 2025 study were referred to in current international preconception guidelines, and 54 percent were considered to have “no evidence for the health outcome.” TikTok and Instagram had a higher percentage of “no evidence” claims than other platforms.

For instance, raw milk is a darling of self-proclaimed “crunchy moms,” yet unpasteurized milk can introduce harmful germs like listeria, which can cause a miscarriage or harm a fetus. Extreme diets and exercise can work against your fertility, too, by affecting the hormones that are necessary for conception, says Kara Goldman, an ob-gyn and associate professor of reproductive endocrinology and infertility and director of fertility preservation at Northwestern University. Recently, a patient with a history of estrogen-receptor-positive breast cancer told her she’d been taking beef organ supplements, not realizing until Goldman dug into the ingredients that the capsules included “ovary” and “uterus.” This meant she was inadvertently taking supplemental estrogen after years of avoiding unnecessary estrogen exposure. Additionally, organ meats like liver can be rich in Vitamin A, which Stentz says can be “very toxic” for pregnancy.

“Any buzzy individual thing is likely sensational, whether that’s Brazil nuts, organ meats, or whatnot,” Stentz adds. “The evidence-based things, they’re not sexy. Maintain a normal BMI, stop smoking, pick a boring prenatal vitamin.”

Pregnancy prep regimens can get pricey fast. A month’s supply of Perelel’s “conception support pack,” which includes a prenatal, omega DHA + EPA, and CoQ12 + folate, costs $58.77. A full swap-out of all kitchen Tupperwares, cooking utensils, and pans can run you hundreds. Add on “soft movement” like Pilates, organic produce, a whole new set of makeup and skin-care products, and it becomes all the more expensive.

In the US, nearly half of adults are single. A quarter of men suffer from loneliness. Rates of depression are on the rise. And one in four Gen Z adults—the so-called kinkiest generation, according to one study—have never had partnered sex.

In an age of endless connection, where hooking up happens with the ease of a swipe and nontraditional relationship structures like polyamory are celebrated, why are people seemingly so disconnected and alone?

Chalk it up to changing social norms or shifting generational attitudes around relationships. But the bigger issue at play, according to Justin Garcia, is that we just don’t crave intimacy in the same way we used to. “Our species is on the precipice of what I have come to think of as an intimacy crisis,” Garcia writes in his new book, The Intimate Animal: The Science of Sex, Fidelity, and Why We Die for Love. Garcia suggests in the book that intimacy—not sex—is the “the most powerful evolutionary motivator of modern relationships,” but that our hunger for it “has been stifled by and misdirected in today’s digital world.”

An evolutionary biologist and anthropologist who began his career studying hookup culture, Garcia is the executive director of the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University, a research lab known for its pioneering work on sexuality, online dating, and aging. (Sex may in fact improve with age, a recent report found). He’s held the position since 2019, and in that time he has also served as the chief scientific advisor to Match, where he provides expertise for its annual Singles in America survey. In 2023, Indiana lawmakers voted to block public funding from the institute—state senator Lorissa Sweet, a Republican, falsely claimed that Kinsey was studying orgasms in minors—but, the following year, the school’s Board of Trustees voted to abandon its plans to separate the institute into a nonprofit.

Garcia’s book covers a lot of ground—the “cognitive overload” of dating apps, why humans are wired to be socially monogamous but not sexually monogamous, the science of breakups—but its throughline is how “even in this bewildering era, where moments of human connection are becoming increasingly elusive, the search for intimacy remains the most human of human impulses.”

On a recent afternoon over Zoom, I spoke with Garcia about the biggest misconception about the sex recession among Gen Z, the attack on sexual literacy in the current political climate, and why an AI chatbot won’t save your relationship. It’s all connected, he says.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

WIRED: What is the intimacy crisis, and why, as you write in the book, are we on the verge of one?

Justin Garcia: We hear a lot about the loneliness epidemic. The research suggests that loneliness is as bad for your health as smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. Psychological loneliness gets embodied in physical and psychological health. At the same time, there are reports that suggest that the numbers haven’t increased all that much for psychological loneliness. But clearly its impact is more, and more people are paying attention to the impact.

For me, there’s a bigger umbrella. We are suddenly talking about loneliness at the same time that all of us have more connections than ever before. That’s why I call it an intimacy crisis. We have more people available to us, particularly through internet and social media platforms, but the depth of the connections, the quality of the connections, is not there.

You suggest that the intimacy crisis can lead to “unprecedented and stark biological consequences.” In what way?

We’re in a moment where the human brain is taking in so much information and so much of the information is threatening. It’s what’s going on in the news, in Gaza and Minnesota, with climate change, with global economics—I mean, pick any section of the paper, it’s bad news. That weighs on our nervous system. Just as humans’ romantic and sexualized lives respond to environments with how they form relationship structures, they’re also responding to this current environment, which is that there’s a lot of threat going on. When the nervous system gets tuned up into a threat response, that’s not conducive to social behavior and it’s most certainly not conducive to mating. If our nervous system is detecting threats from all this stuff in our environment, that has all sorts of effects on our relationships. And if we don’t have the safety net of deep intimacy, we can’t effectively weather these storms.